CHAPTER XXX
HE next morning at breakfast Mrs. Henley seemed to have lost all memory of the angry scene on the grass the evening before. Her countenance was overcast with an expression that her husband would have designated as one of pleasure had he been given to the analysis of her facial phenomena, a pursuit he had long since given up as futile and unprofitable. Her dress, too, showed unusual care, and a crisp, fresh-ironed jauntiness that jerked him back to the past with rather disagreeable suddenness. Amid the white ruffles at her neck she had pinned a large, full-blown rose, and her manner toward the others was a fragile sort of graciousness which would have been a delight if one could have felt that it was permanent. As a rule she passed Henley's coffee to him through the hands of the two Wrinkles, but this morning she rose and brought it round to him, remarking that she had fixed it just to his liking. Old Wrinkle, as his intimates—and many others—knew, was not backward in the use of his tongue, and yet there was something in the unwonted ceremony of the present meal that silenced him. The old fellow, however, was making a record-breaking use of his eyes. Henley saw him taking in every detail of his former daughter-in-law's appearance and mood, and smiling all too knowingly for anybody's comfort as he munched and gulped.
After breakfast Henley was at the gate ready to walk to the store when Wrinkle came to him and clutched his arm familiarly.
"Wait, I'll go 'long with you," he said. "I want to talk to you some, anyway. Alf, did you ever since the world was made—"
But his words were lost on the morning air, for Mrs. Henley was calling to her husband from the porch, where she stood smiling at him from the honeysuckle vines.
"Don't go yet!" she called out, and she tripped down the steps toward him. She paused at a rose-bush on the way and plucked a bright-red bud, and, bringing it to him, she began to fasten it on the lapel of his coat. "You are getting entirely too slouchy," she mumbled, a pin in her mouth. "You never used to wear such dowdy clothes. You've got to spruce up—ain't he, Pa?"
"Well, it ain't Sunday, nor camp-meetin'," Wrinkle made answer. "He looks well enough for every day; he'd look odd with a long, jimswinger coat on in that dusty store with all them one-gallus mossbacks he makes his livin' out of. Them fellers 'u'd laugh at 'im an' say he was gittin' rich too fast at the'r expense."
As red as the flower with which she was trying to adorn him, Henley pushed the bud away. "I don't want it," he said. "I never was any hand to put on such things. I'd be a purty sight, now, wouldn't I—walkin' in town with a flower-garden pinned to me?"